Senior Data Engineer
Summary
Hands-on Senior/Staff/Principal data engineer on the Platform team of a frontier AI company, owning data systems end to end: building scalable pipelines to ingest, process and integrate large, messy datasets for AI training environments, with data quality, PII removal and secure storage. Hybrid role in London or Paris.
Senior / Staff / Principal Data Engineer, Platform
About the company
This frontier AI company builds interactive, resettable digital environments where AI agents can explore software, complete tasks, learn from failure and improve through active experience. These environments generate the experiential data required to train increasingly capable AI systems.
Working at the intersection of software engineering, simulation infrastructure and AI, the company collaborates closely with leading AI laboratories and is building the platform needed to create and operate these environments at scale. Its mission is to help advance AI through higher-quality, real-world training experiences.
The culture is high-trust, low-bureaucracy and focused on curiosity, intellectual honesty, pragmatism and relentless execution. Team members are given meaningful autonomy, technical influence and responsibility in a fast-moving environment.
Responsabilities
As Data Engineer, Platform, you will join the Platform team as part of its data specialisation, working across data infrastructure, software engineering and AI rather than within a siloed analytics function, and reporting to the VP Engineering. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role at every level, keeping you close to code, production systems and debugging.
You will own significant data systems from problem definition and design through implementation and production operation. This includes building scalable systems for acquiring, ingesting, processing and integrating large datasets, turning raw, messy or inconsistent data into reliable datasets used across the AI platform, and developing systems for data quality, validation, sanitisation and PII removal. You will design secure approaches to storing and accessing acquired data, solve problems around duplication, corruption, inconsistent formats, provenance and data lifecycle, and integrate new datasets into the infrastructure used to build AI training environments.
Working closely with software, AI and platform engineers, you will make pragmatic trade-offs across scale, reliability, observability, security and cost. At Staff / Principal level, you will own technical direction for significant areas of the data infrastructure, establish patterns other engineers can build on, and provide technical direction without formal line-management authority.
Requirements
- Senior, Staff or Principal-level data or software engineer with strong software engineering fundamentals and experience gravitating towards data-intensive systems.
- Experience building and operating production data systems, pipelines, platforms or data-intensive applications.
- Proven independent ownership of substantial technical problems, including working confidently when requirements are incomplete or evolving.
- Experience working with large, complex or messy datasets.
- Strong system-design judgement around storage, processing, reliability, scalability and cost.
- Cloud infrastructure and production environment experience, with the ability to go deep when debugging unfamiliar systems.
- Experience with large-scale ingestion, unstructured data, batch and streaming architectures, PII detection or data provenance is highly valued. Stack-agnostic, and previous AI experience is not required.
Compensation & Benefits
- Base salary of approximately £100,000–£220,000, depending on level and experience.
- Meaningful equity in a well-funded, rapidly growing frontier AI company.
- Hybrid working in London or Paris, typically two days per week onsite.
- The first five weeks are expected to be full-time onsite in your local office.